ABOUT THE BOOK

For nearly 30 years, George Zimmer forged a relationship with American men who wanted to like the way they looked without getting too fussy about it. He made them a promise that came straight from the shoulder: “I guarantee it,” he said, and it was ironclad. 

By the millions, customers walked into Men’s Wearhouse stores in all 50 states and Canada, where they received “quality, service, and a good price,” where they bought suits, ties, sports coats, and slacks by the tens of billions of dollars, where they were never rushed, where they were always respected. Then, a coup, in which Zimmer’s hand-picked board of directors fired him from the company that he created and developed into the most successful men’s specialty store of all time. Zimmer writes that the disagreement between him and his board reflected the ongoing debate over the future of capitalism in America.

He establishes himself as a strong proponent and practitioner of “stakeholder capitalism,” which holds that corporations should hold their employees, customers, vendors and communities in the same regard as they do their investors. Zimmer argues that the board’s genuflection to “shareholder capitalism” where the only thing that matters is the bottom line ultimately led to his termination. Eight years after his firing, Zimmer comes back to recount his journey – a fortunate son raised by a prosperous and loving family, a fun-loving countercultural warrior of the Sixties, a merchant, an entrepreneur, a pitch man for the ages.

His book guides the reader through his frustrations with the cutthroat nature of the retail business that inspired him to start his own business and run it his way – with heart, and according to the Golden Rule. It is a long, zany, and wildly successful trip, recalled in breezy detail from the shoestring beginnings of The Men’s Wearhouse, to Zimmer’s iconic advertising campaigns, to the company’s explosive growth, to his taking his company public and ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.